Association for Defending Victims of Terrorism – The Ontario Superior Court sentenced the perpetrator of the premeditated attack that killed four members of a Muslim family in London in 2021 to life imprisonment and considered his attack an act of terrorism. He will not be eligible for parole until he has spent 25 years behind bars.
Judge Renee Pomerance, who issued the ruling today, refused to pronounce Nathaniel Feltman’s name, but said that his actions on June 6, 2021, when he deliberately ran over Afzal’s Muslim family in London, Ontario, with his pickup truck, were motivated by hatred and Islamophobia, and were therefore considered an act of terrorism. Under Canadian laws.
This is the first time Canada’s terrorism laws have been invoked in a first-degree murder trial.
This car-ramming attack resulted in the killing of Yumna Afzal (15 years old), her mother Madiha Salman (44 years old), her father Salman Afzal (46 years old), and Talat Afzal (74 years old), Salman’s mother, and the injury of the child Fayez Afzal, Yumna’s brother, who was then At the age of nine, he suffered severe injuries from which he later survived.
“The perpetrator wanted to make Muslims afraid to be in Canada, afraid to go to the park, to the mosque, to live their lives. He wanted to create these fears among Muslims and bring a lot of fear into themselves to get them to leave the country,” prosecutor Sarah Al-Sheikh told Judge Pomerance at the January hearing.
